Israeli left lawmaker says Corbyn is an ‘anti-Semite,’ but Netanyahu isn’t a racist cause ‘you can’t be an Israeli PM and be racist’

Last Tuesday, Israeli left Zionist Union lawmaker Ayelet Nahmias-Verbin was attending a UK Labour conference in Liverpool, where she was interviewed by a London broadcasting station, and it was all about Corbyn’s supposed ‘anti-Semitic problem’. After Nahmias-Verbin determined Corbyn to be an anti-Semite (“unfortunately and sadly”), she was asked whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is racist.

Iain Dale of LBC: A lot of the people at your Labour party conference firmly believe that your Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is racist. Do you?

Nahmias-Verbin: Well, I think Binyamin Netanyahu is not racist, but I do believe he’s doing a lot of things the wrong way […] But I do not believe that he’s racist. You can’t really be Prime Minister of Israel and be racist, I’ve got to tell you, even if your name is Binyamin Netanyahu.

With those words the interview ends, and it’s a real jaw-drop for many of us.

Nahmias-Verbin did not provide any actual evidence whatsoever for her claim that Corbyn is an anti-Semite. Here is the bit where she calls Corbyn an anti-Semite, and here one can follow her reasoning of why that is supposedly so.

Dale: Do you believe that Jeremy Corbyn is anti-Semitic himself?

Nahmias-Verbin: Unfortunately and sadly, I believe that he [Corbyn] is anti-Semite [sic] himself, he really is not concerned with being balanced when it comes to Israel-Palestinian issues, but more importantly, he is, maybe, anti-racist, you know, I really didn’t see any indications for that, real indications for that, but his is anti-Semite [sic], and unfortunately, the Jewish community, the wonderful Jewish British community here, who really want to remain both identities [sic], to stand strongly by both identities, feel unsafe when it comes to the option that Mr. Corbyn should go into Number 10 [Downing Street]. And I think that indicates more than anything else, that we are dealing with something that is very untypical, and definitely, definitely, has nothing to do with Labour party values. What kind of, really, what kind of values do you share, Mr. Corbyn, with those terrorists, what kind of Labour party values do you share with those inhumane people?

On the one hand that’s a real mouthful. But it’s also void of any substance as an answer to the interviewer’s question.

Notice how Nahmias-Verbin begins with politics – she attacks his politics as being imbalanced, in her view, when it comes to Israel-Palestine issues. That’s a political opinion. This doesn’t indicate anti-Semitism per se. In fact, when it came to Verbin-Nahmias’s critique of Netanyahu later, she said pretty much the same things: “I do believe Netanyahu is doing things the wrong way,” she said, criticizing his intransigent position on dialogue with Palestinians. “I’m not happy about what [Netanyahu is] doing, that’s why I wake up in the morning, every morning, picking a new fight”, she says.

So when it comes to political disagreement with Netanyahu, his bias concerning Palestinians in no way suggests that he is racist, according to Nahmias-Verbin, and neither could he be, because he’s the Prime Minister of Israel… But when it comes to Jeremy Corbyn, his political bias, according to Nahmias-Verbin, is the core of the matter.

Ironically, she is revealing a great truth in her rant. This is about politics and nothing else.

Nahmias-Verbin cannot cite any real, substantial evidence suggesting that Corbyn is anti-Semitic, because there is none. “He really is not concerned with being balanced when it comes to Israel-Palestinian issues.” Her next statement is about him possibly being anti-racist, but certainly anti-Semitic. Of course, if you are anti-racist, that precludes your being anti-Semitic, because anti-Semitism is a form of racism, just one of the many which Corbyn opposes.

Then after those two rather invalid points, including the vacuous circular logic that Corbyn is anti-Semitic because he just is, Nahmias Verbin turns to how British Jews will feel “unsafe” if Corbyn were to become Prime Minister, because they want to stand strongly by “both identities”. The two “identities” Nahmias-Verbin is ostensibly referring to are the Jewish and British ones. But there are many Jews who feel utterly safe with the idea of Corbyn becoming Prime Minister. There has been no indication of a rise in anti-Semitism due to Corbyn’s election to lead Labour. What this really is about is not the duality of Jewish and British identities, but rather Zionist and British.

The conservative Jewish leadership, as well as the conservative Labour constituency and the Tories wants to maintain an unflinching support of Israel, and the “unsafety” they feel is about their politics being challenged.

This is what this has always been about. These Jewish “feelings” of “unsafety” have been the substance in itself, in lieu of any actual substance to the charges against Corbyn of him being an anti-Semite and of Labour in general having an “anti-Semitic problem”.

Nahmias-Verbin’s rant portrays precisely this lack of substance, this hot air of emotion concerning a political issue, dressed up as if it was racist and anti-Semtic, since it threatens to challenge the Zionist orthodoxy.

Notice – this message is being delivered to us by an Israeli lawmaker who is supposedly on the left – in a party that is supposed to be the equivalent of the British Labour party, and she is trying to condition it from the ‘inside’. This tactic is not new. One may be reminded that the British Jewish Labour Movement leader, Ella Rose, had stepped into the JLM outfit straight out from her Public Relations office at the Israeli Embassy. Rose had featured in the Al Jazeera investigative documentary ‘The Lobby’ where she expressed the hope that journalist Asa Winstanley would “die in a hole” for having exposed her record, and vowed to use “Krav Maga” –Israeli hand-combat techniques– to take down Jackie Walker, a leading critic and now twice suspended member of Labour. Asa Winstanley has noted how The Jewish Labour Movement had acted as a proxy for the Israeli embassy, and how Rose worked closely with Shai Masot, the Israeli embassy spy who was forced out of the UK after the undercover Al Jazeera investigation in 2017 exposed him plotting to “take down” a senior UK government minister.

“We work with Shai, we know him very well,” Ella Rose admitted to an undercover reporter in 2016.

The Jewish Labour Movement is not really about being Jewish – it is about being Zionist. And they want to tell us, even force it down our throat (maybe by Krav Maga techniques, who knows), that being Jewish and Zionist is absolutely one thing. Just as chief UK Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis said: “One can no more separate [Zionism] from Judaism than separate the City of London from Great Britain”. Mirvis also said that we should not use the Z-word, because Jewish students at universities were confronted with a “wall of anti-Zionism, which they feel and know to be Jew hatred”.

Neither is Ayelet Nahmias-Verbin using the Z-word. But it’s in the name of her party, the Zionist Union. There’s a reason why that Z-word is in the name – it is very important for Israeli Zionist leftists to mark that although they are leftists, they are certainly not “Arab-lovers”, as former Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog had warned them about.

And that is basically what the Israeli Zionist Union wants to do to the British Labour. It wants to ensure that its leader is not an “Arab lover”. Nahmias-Verbin noted in the interview that her party had “disengaged from Jeremy Corbyn’s office, but not from the Labour party”. Imagine that – a party democratically elects its leader, and a sister-party in another country doesn’t like the leader, so it boycotts the leader, but maintains relations with the party as a whole, and the party lets it. If this is not insurgency, what is?

But we must return to Nahmias-Verbin’s last claim, that’s a real eye-opener: “You can’t really be Prime Minister of Israel and be racist”.

No, those Jewish Zionist terrorists and ethnic cleansers who became Prime Ministers from right and left, basically running in a series from Israel’s inception, they couldn’t possibly be racists. But if Corbyn engages with any of those who were on the receiving side of that colonialist onslaught, then he’s meeting “terrorists” and “inhumane people”. But Zionist leaders are never terrorists nor inhumane. Their actions are merely due to them being Zionists, and that’s always humane. Thus the inherent suggestion in the Zionist Union’s lawmaker’s words is, that Zionism couldn’t possibly be racist, and if you’re a Zionist, you just can’t be a racist – at least not an anti-Semite.

This is the idiocy that even the British left allows in as a supposed logical advocacy. Apparently, so many are so scared of potentially being embroiled in an anti-Semitic witch hunt, that they rush to the safest haven – Zionism. If you love Israel, you couldn’t possibly be an anti-Semite. Who cares if you’re an anti-racist in general or not – that’s secondary. The moment you challenge Zionist hegemony in any way, you’re risking it. Bottom line: make sure you’re not seen to be an Arab-lover, that’s the worst.

“Israeli minister seeks budgetary power to control historical narrative”

“Miri Regev approves of excavations that tell Jewish stories, but not of institutions offering Palestinian perspectives.”

The Art Newspaper – by Lauren Gelfond Feldinger, Oct. 2nd, 2018

“Israel’s culture minister, Miri Regev, will introduce a ‘loyalty in culture’ bill in the next parliamentary session, which opens this month, her spokesman has confirmed to The Art Newspaper. The proposed legislation, if passed, would give her ministry various powers to prevent or cut funding for cultural organisations that criticize Israel or stage events discussing Palestinian history and rights.

“The introduction of the bill follows months of accelerated lobbying by the culture minister to silence or remove subsidies from organisations that she deems unpatriotic. Regev has instead promoted initiatives that focus exclusively on Israel’s Jewish history.

“Since 2011, the finance ministry has had sole legal authority to slash government money for institutions that ‘dishonour’ state symbols, question Israel’s existence as a ‘Jewish and democratic’ state or observe Israeli Independence Day by commemorating the experiences of Palestinians during the establishment of Israel. The finance ministry has not yet enforced this obscurely worded legislation and this has enraged the culture minister.

“’The finance minister does not deal with lawbreakers,’ the spokesman says. ‘Regev wrote almost 100 letters [to him] about different events [that used language] against the army and the country and he didn’t do anything.’

“In June, Regev posted a letter on her Facebook page that she had written to Israel’s attorney general, imploring him to ‘promote a law that will allow us to defund once and for all cultural institutions that use public spaces’ to host events that undermine ‘our existence, symbols and values.’ She singled out the Barbur Gallery in Jerusalem as an example of a venue that subverts the state.

“The gallery, which Regev has never visited, mostly stages exhibitions, but occasionally organises events that Regev opposes. In April, she failed to prevent the gallery from hosting an Israeli Independence Day discussion between Israelis and Palestinians who had lost loved ones in the ongoing conflict.

“Regev also asked Jerusalem’s mayor, Nir Barakat, to intervene in June when Barbur planned to host the launch of a Hebrew-language book on the ways in which Palestinian losses after the establishment of Israel are discussed in Hebrew-speaking society. The Jerusalem civil court ruled against the city’s petition to prevent it.

“On 30 August, however, Jerusalem’s regional court ruled that the city has the authority to evict the art gallery to reclaim the municipal property. Judge Amir Dahan acknowledged that the ‘motive to pursue the petition is the city’s discomfort with expressions on municipal property.’ The gallery is considering an appeal to the High Court. Meanwhile, the gallery’s lawyer, Yossi Havilio, a mayoral candidate, could overturn the ruling if he is elected this month.

“Mayor Barakat responded to the ruling on Facebook: ‘We will not allow squatters on city properties… to hurt Israeli soldiers and the state of Israel.’

“The gallery operated for 11 years with federal and municipal support, and without interference, until Regev became minister in 2015, says its director, Masha Zusman. ‘We had official approvals and assurances and nobody objected. But the whole story is political [now]—there is a competition between Barakat and Regev over who can be more right wing.’

“Approved narrative”
“In August, Regev and Barakat helped to inaugurate a Jewish Yemenite heritage centre in Silwan, a poor and crowded Palestinian neighbourhood in east Jerusalem. Residents have complained for years that Israeli authorities support digs and tourism for Jewish heritage without consulting with or involving them, and that excavations and building damage their properties and ignore their land rights and history. As police pushed protesting locals away, Regev said at the opening that archaeologists would not find Palestinian heritage underground.

“The Israeli archaeologist Raphael Greenberg, who has dug in Silwan, called her words ‘inaccurate’ and ‘at odds with Jerusalem’s 5,000-year history.’

“Yemenite Jews, who lived in Silwan from the 1880s until 1938, are included in the 1922 Silwan Census, which lists a population of 1,699 Muslim, 153 Jewish and 49 Christian residents. The archaeologist Yonathan Mizrachi, whose organisation Emek Shaveh encourages archaeologists to work with local communities and to present multiple histories, explained that there are dozens of ancient layers at the site, representing different periods.

“But Regev, Barakat, other arms of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and state-supported settlers ‘impose a singular, exclusive, nationalist narrative’ that marginalises the Palestinian presence and history and leads to evictions, confiscations and conflict, says Betty Herschman, the international director of Ir Amim, an organisation seeking an equitable and agreed-upon political resolution on the status of Jerusalem.

Despite the ruling by Israel’s Supreme Court last year that a heritage site under Israeli rule has to be more inclusive of different histories and religions, Regev continues to commit her ministry to expanding excavations and tourism in east Jerusalem with the goal of revealing and promoting artefacts or events related to Jewish history. ‘As the minister says, every place we dig in Jerusalem we find Jewish antiquities. Palestinians don’t find any coins. Jerusalem [belongs to] the Jewish people,’ her spokesman says.

“Regev, who opposes a Palestinian state, recently told Israel’s 103FM Radio that in Israel, everyone can have individual rights, but only Jewish people should have ‘national rights.’ Divisions and tensions are not about rights, but have been created and fuelled by the Israeli left, she said, ‘in order to overthrow the government.’ She admitted that she is seen as a ‘bulldozer’ but considers this to be a compliment.”

You sound so tough. would you patronizing use Lou Alcinder to taunt Kareem Abul Jamar? How about Mohammed Ali’s legacy? Call him cassius clay? you are the most hypocritical of bigots that exist. Only people like you obsess over Netanyahu’s families former name . How about all the Israel Arabs as palestinians with their nation of origin attached to their own names? Al Libya, al egypt, etc.

Oh, and there’s this, buried deep in the recesses of the Guardian’s Letters page:

“We have long had serious concerns about the lack of due impartiality and accuracy in the reporting of allegations of antisemitism against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party. The recent report by the Media Reform Coalition examining coverage of Labour’s revised code of conduct on antisemitism shows that we are right to be concerned.

The research examined over 250 articles and broadcast news segments and found over 90 examples of misleading or inaccurate reporting. In relation to the IHRA definition of antisemitism that was at the heart of the dispute, the research found evidence of “overwhelming source imbalance” in which critics of Labour’s code of conduct dominated coverage, with nearly 50% of Guardian reports, for example, failing to include any quotes from those defending the code or critiquing the IHRA definition. Moreover, key contextual facts about the IHRA definition – for example that it has only been formally adopted by eight countries (and only six of the IHRA member states) – were consistently excluded.

The researchers conclude these were not occasional lapses in judgment but “systematic reporting failures” that served to weaken the Labour leadership and to bolster its opponents within and outside of the party.”

That the Jonathan Freedland Guardian is one of the worst offenders will surprise noone who has been observing (!) the sad decline of this once admirable newspaper over the past several years.

And don’t forget the BBC also we’re heavily criticised in that report. Naturally they haven’t responded to the report. Sadly the licence fee-funded organisation, who strive to be impartial, were perfectly happy to use the British Jewish community as a political football – specifically to delegitimise Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

The only ones that came out unscathed from that report were the New Left Media.

Yes, supremacist ideologies, including Zionism and anti-Semitism, are often based on racism but need not be. Until recent times, for instance, religious anti-Semitism was much more common than the racist variety.

Stephen Shenfield: Until recent times, for instance, religious anti-Semitism was much more common than the racist variety.

The same can be said for religious anti-Zionism, such as the religious views expressed in Reform Judaism’s old Pittsburg Platform. The right of Jews living in other countries to hold and express contrarian anti-Zionist views were part of the justification for the safeguarding clause contained in both the British Mandate and the US Palestine Mandate Convention.

There are similar legislative safeguards and a very long line of Supreme Court precedents today in the USA that can be employed against ham-handed attempts to label religiously-motivated forms of Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and even Humanist anti-Zionism as prohibited forms of racial discrimination or “anti-Semitism”. Ken Marcus, who heads the Trump administration’s Campus Anti-Zionism equals Anti-Semitism campaign admitted that fact in the footnotes of his seminal work on the subject: Kenneth L. Marcus, Anti-Zionism as Racism: Campus Anti-Semitism and the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
15 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 837 (2007), http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmborj/vol15/iss3/4

Likewise, the “free exercise clause of the 1st Amendment and the Federal and State “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” (RFRA) statutes protect the right of businesses to boycott Israel on the bases of their various firmly held anti-Zionist religious beliefs.

The Supreme Court has long since ruled that consumers and businesses have a constitutionally protected right to take part in “political” boycotts. See for example the ACLU article “The First Amendment Protects the Right To Boycott Israel”. https://goo.gl/h1dB8c

This Nachmias-Verbin is a racist herself, if only because of the way she describes Palestinians in general as terrorists and inhumane people:
“What kind of, really, what kind of values do you share, Mr. Corbyn, with those terrorists, what kind of Labour party values do you share with those inhumane people?”

The only thing I can take away from this woman’s notion that netanyahoo can’t be racist because he’s the PM of the racist ‘state’ of ‘israel’ is because he’s a jew and jews can’t be racist because (insert your favorite ziosplanation for that one – there’s at least 6 million of them that have nothing to do with palestinians)) BUT Corbyn is definitely antisemitic because he’s not a jew and therefore does not recognize/honor/fellate the entitled zionist jewish supremacy and he thinks all people are created equal and because he looked at her weird.

One part of me thinks that it is outrageous that this Fascist creature is allowed to spout her rambling contradictory nonsense at a Labour Party conference but then I remind myself that especially with the I/P issue it is important that she and her ilk are given the opportunity to do so as it exposes them for what they are – feral racists. Especially impressed by the wonderful blooper which she dropped when referring to the two “identities” which British Jews have ie the British one and the Israel one. Now this to me is borderline Anti – Semitic as per the Zios own IHRA parchment:
“Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations”

All in all she is an absolute brainwashed right wing yenta masquerading as some sort of member of the imagined Israeli “Left”.

Of course, if you are anti-racist, that precludes your being anti-Semitic, because anti-Semitism is a form of racism, just one of the many which Corbyn opposes

That’s too naive for words!
If the antisemitism inventors, dealers and snuffers ever had meant by it any kind of racism (=discrimination due any inborn characteristic) well than, there wouldn’t be a special word for antisemitism because there wouldn’t exist any need for inventing it.
Face it: anyone who even speaks of “antisemitism” necessarily has some hidden axe to grind.

So Jeremy Corbyn is anti-Semitic because he is not balanced? Anybody else notice that balance only applies when people are unabashedly pro-Palestinian? Where is the balance in Pro-Zionist circles? Are they anti-Palestinian?

Chief Rabbi Mirvis: “One can no more separate [Zionism] from Judaism than separate the City of London from Great Britain”.

In fact London and Great Britain are separable. Under the ancient Roman occupation London already existed (Londinium, to be precise) but Britain was not ‘Great’ because Roman power ended at Hadrian’s Wall — it did not extend to Scotland. ‘Great Britain’ as the union of England and Wales with Scotland did not come into existence until 1707.

The Chief Rabbi, along with his predecessor, Jonathan Sacks, needs more carefully to study his history to know that, after Zionism was born and was learning to walk, although had not reached the adolescent stage of sending more than a handful of colonists to Palestine, many prominent, assimilated Jews chose very much to separate their Judaism from Zionism. They perceived the latter as a threat to their continued acceptance in British and other European societies where they had achieved economic security, position and participation in government or state institutions, not to mention in some cases earned titles of nobility for political or philanthropic efforts. Their homes were the countries in which they lived and they had had no appetite for Zionism to cast the un-wished for shadow of suspected divided loyalty over them and their families.
Some even foresaw and demurred at the prospect of what would befall the indigenous non-Jews in Palestine if the Zionist colonial project, with its supremacist tenets, proceeded.

More “on-message”, btw, what’s this bl**dy MK doing in the first place at the British Labour Party’s conference in Liverpool? Trying to suborn another country’s democratic processes, one supposes, much as depicted in the AJ documentary showing the Lobby hoping to find dirt on Sir Alan Duncan so he could be “brought down”…. The motives of whomever invited her need examining.

The whole Corbyn A/S campaign is now a busted flush. The MSM are desperately trying to keep it alive with the occasional oblique parachuted reference but there is not much more of the A/S crap for them to serve up as news. It has become so so boring and so so predictable . It is generally accepted in the MSM that Corbyn came across very well in his conference speech and emerged from the conference stronger . Difficult to see what Ziocentral and its UK Labour Party operatives in the UK do from here in the prevent JC from becoming PM at all cost campaign. Accusations of large scale tax evasion/fraud? Unlikely – generally speaking grow your own allotment holders aren`t into that sort of thing.

Henry Norr, ‘left’ is a relative term per definition. She is considered to be on the left of the Israeli political spectrum.
Although it may be rightfully insulting for an actual leftist, I think that noting the fact that this is Israeli left, is in itself a natural condemnation of Israeli politics.

Gideon Levy, “The Split on the Right
The sad and unbelievable joke about the break-up of the Zionist Union faction: Israel fancies this a rift on the left

“Two days ago, there was another rift in the Israeli right: The Zionist Union faction split apart. The two main right-wingers, Tzipi Livni and Avi Gabbay, Likud traitors both, dissolved their partnership.

The sad and unbelievable joke: Israel fancies this a rift on the left; as if there are seriously two camps in Israel, left and right, locked in fierce battle over the face of the nation. There is no left, not even half a left. There is only a right, in different forms.

What is going on in our political system ahead of the upcoming election can be described like this: Right A versus Right B, a split in Right C, a possible merger in Right D, and a new glimmer of hope in Right E.”

Alternatively, the word is an amalgam of the Greek prefix hypo-, meaning “under,” and the verb krinein, meaning “to sift or decide.” Thus the original meaning implied a deficiency in the ability to sift or decide. This deficiency, as it pertains to one’s own beliefs and feelings, informs the word’s contemporary meaning.

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